


Why I Hate the Jungle

by Deannie



Series: The Losers' Tour Book [5]
Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 15:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5132801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I know what has to happen. I can see in his eyes that Jensen, young and scared and green as he is, knows what has to happen. It’s just a question of whether our fearless-but-too-fucking-noble leader knows what has to happen. </p><p>“Get in the air, Eagle,” I say clearly. The kid nods his understanding. “We’ll hole up for secondary evac.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why I Hate the Jungle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cougars_catnip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cougars_catnip/gifts).



> FINALLY! Roque is a jerk and this one was hard going. But the series is finally complete! Huzzah!
> 
> Timestamp: This takes place before the flashback in [A Chasm in Two Jumps](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4726121) and before the events recalled in [Debriefing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1504385).

“ _Be advised, we are sidewise._ ”

I barely hear Clay on the radio over the heavy fire bearing right down on my ass.

“No, you think?” I don’t bother to switch on my mic—too damn busy trying not to get my head shot off as I work my way out of what was _supposed to be_ a mostly empty weapons bunker held by one of the district’s most active drug cartels.

Clay’s running, huffing over the throat mic. Good to hear. “ _Fireman and Jackrabbit, consolidate at Rendezvous 6-4._ ”

Damn—secondary evac site. A full two klicks away. If I can get out of this damn bunker complex alive, I’ll be sure to get there, Clay, thanks. At least he and Cougar and Pooch made it out, it sounds like. Jensen—and Jackrabbit ain’t far from the truth with him—is probably stuck in the communications building. If he’s not dead already. I don’t think Martinez would take to the idea of the multinational task force having a hard drive full of his business.

If he’s alive, though, I’m gonna kill Jensen. Motherfucker said the bulk of Martinez’s crew would be on the move by 0430, according to radio traffic. So why the hell, at 1640, am I being chased by—Shit! A fucking grenade!? Really? I fall away from the twisted metal and concrete left by the blast, my leg smarting from a smack of rebar that’ll probably leave a welt, and spy an egress to my right. Finally!

“ _Fireman, can I get a twenty? Fireman, do you read?_ ” Jensen sounds perky, even with gunfire of his own in the background. God damn that kid. I knew Clay made a mistake when he added him to the team. Lily-white tech with probably no fucking experience whatsoever in the field. I swear he thinks he’s on a ride at Disneyland half the time. “ _Come on, man, I’m twisting in the trees here. Where are you?_ ”

“ _Jackrabbit, get your ass to evac,_ ” Clay barks over the line.

I flick on my mic to second that order. “Agreed, get gone. I’m heading out of the damn— _fuck_!” A round— _two_ rounds—drill into my already aching left thigh and I’m thrown sideways into a wall, about ten feet from the promised land. Typical. I end up on my side and my leg is deadwood. God damn it, I can feel the blood running down inside my fatigues. Not a gusher, but it ain’t good. I twist around toward the tunnel behind me and raise my rifle and load every ounce of pain and piss into taking down the last eight men trailing me.

“ _One of the two of you answer me, damn it!_ ” Clay’s freaking, which is just fine by me. I really am gonna kill him for this one. A spate of gunfire goes off just outside the entrance and I bring my rifle up and tighten on the trigger—

—and stop myself before I blow Jensen in half.

“God damn it, Jensen,” I growl, as he drops to his knees beside me and gives me a quick once-over in the dim corridor. Kid’s in one piece, not a scratch on him. “Be glad I ain’t as pissed as I should be about that intell. Skeleton crew, my ass”

“Nice to see you too, Roque.” Jensen smirks in that adrenalin junkie way of his and pulls a pressure bandage out of his vest before sliding out that pathetic little boot knife and slitting open my pant leg. I don’t look. I don’t need to look. It’s fucking bad and I can tell by the ass-busting pain and the buzzing in my ears that has nothing to do with the grenade I was too close to earlier. “Thanks for not shooting me, by the way.”

“Yeah, you ain’t worth the ammunition,” I reply tightly. Not that I haven’t thought about it too damn many times since we were deployed two months ago. Jensen is a loose cannon. And a child. And probably a walking violation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which I try very hard not to think about at times like this when he’s right up in my face.

He ties the bandage tight enough that I have to swallow a scream. “Is that any way to talk to the guy who’s going to have to carry your ass out of here?”

“Fuck that,” I tell him, shoving against the wall and trying to get to my feet with my weight on my right foot. “I can carry my own ass.”

Jensen steps back and lets me claw the wall a minute and I come closer than I ever have to pulling a knife and just gutting him right here. Fuck. That leg isn’t gonna do shit for me, is it? I look up and see him watching, not with the “I told you so” look I expected, but with almost-serious concern.

“Fine,” I grate coldly. “Help me up. At least you’re tall enough to be a crutch.”

“ _J come on, say something before one of us does something stupid. What the hell’s the sit rep?_ ” Pooch is wound. And by “one of us,” we all know he means Cougar. He and Jensen might as well get a fucking room, half the time.

“Shit, yeah,” Jensen mutters, switching on his mic. “We are fubar and heading to extraction.” He leans down and uses a strength I didn’t know he had to haul me to my feet, then holds me there a second. I’m not puking in front of him. Am not. “Be advised we have injuries.”

“ _Understood,_ ” Clay puts in, ready to spit nails. “ _We’ll have ‘em keep the engine warm when they get here. Move your asses._ ”

Jensen takes about half my weight and we manage an acceptable shamble out of the darkness of the bunker and into the greenish twilight of a jungle evening.

“I’m _pretty_ sure I got the ones out here,” he says blithely, his pistol in the hand that isn’t holding me up. “Just keep an eye open.” He looks at me sharply, that worry in his eyes again. “And awake. Stay awake, too.”

“Shut the fuck up and walk, Jensen.” I am not in the mood for this kid’s attitude right now. Every step is murder, and I’m on high alert, which makes the headache worse. I can hear the sound of helo blades from the direction of the secondary extraction. “Wonder what happened to Rendezvous 0-6,” I mutter, trying not to pass out and prove Jensen’s worry accurate.

“It’s kind of a crater,” Jensen replies matter-of-factly. “Pooch might have been a little pissed that they tried to take out Clay with a grenade, so… Quid pro quo.”

I snort. “There’s a lot of that going around.”

A twig snaps at the treeline and Jensen and I are both firing before we think. A body falls forward out of the jungle and we both freeze a minute, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I turn my head to watch him surveying the area, more clear-eyed and focused than he’s ever been. Six ops in the last eight weeks, and this might be the first sign I’ve seen that the kid is an honest-to-God black ops trained soldier.

Apparently, Fate is a pegleg, because the complex falls silent with our guns, and we start making our way to the treeline ourselves.

“Sorry for taking so long,” he says shortly, steering us south of the complex. We’re on the other side from the extraction point, but there’s shit we can do about that right now. We need cover and a second to figure out the lay of the land before we skirt around toward Clay and the others. “I was kind of pinned down there for a while.”

I nod as we worm our way deeper into the jungle, my leg screaming bloody murder every inch of the way. “You get your rocks off, at least?” I ask, my breath coming hard. Be damn shame if we left without the files HQ has such a hard-on for.

Jensen grins like a fucking teenager and I worry he might’ve taken me literally. “My pants are full, Captain, thanks for asking.”

He lives to make my stomach turn.

“By which I mean I have a hard drive full of dirty little secrets shoved in my pocket, so get your mind out of the gutter,” he continues.

“ _We have evac on the ground,_ ” Pooch calls out. “ _ETA?_ ”

I run the maps through my head and curse as I flick on my mic. “Ten minutes out,” I grate angrily.

“Fifteen,” Jensen corrects. “Allowing for broken drumstick.” Fucking narc—I can move just fine. And it ain’t broken.

“ _Shit,_ ” Clay whispers almost silently. “ _Acknowledged, stray sheep. Advise we have had sporadic engagement on the ground. Keep your eyes open._ ”

Thanks, Frankie. I couldn’t have figured that out my own damn self. More fucking rats in this nest than flies on shit. “HUA, sir,” Jensen replies, gripping his pistol more firmly. “Will apprise on our progress.”

“ _Acknowledged. Out._ ”

Jensen looks me up and down critically and starts trying to lower me to the ground. I plant my right leg like a tree and fight him.

“You’re gonna bleed out before we get halfway there if I don’t retie that bandage,” he tells me mildly. “If you want to do that, I can just leave you here and make my own way to the rendezvous, but I’m pretty sure Clay’ll kill me if I come back without you.”

“Fuck you, Jensen,” I belt back, letting my right leg collapse me to the ground. To his credit, he eases my fall without landing on me, but he’s got a crease of anger between his eyes. It’s the closest I’ve seen to him losing his shit, which is just wrong. Hell, even Pooch gets pissed once in a while.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell, man,” he replies, a tease in his voice that’s nearly a challenge. “And of all the people in this unit, I will _never_ ask _you_.” He tears off the bandage that’s soaked in blood and takes a longer look at the wounds now that we’re in relative safety. “God damn, Roque,” he mutters. “You’re a freaking pincushion.”

“Two bullets, Jensen,” I growl. “Hardly a pincushion and I don’t need your commentary.”

I look down to glare at him and find him way too quiet. And then I look down farther. Shit. Looks like I wasn’t as far from that grenade as I thought. My thigh’s hamburger and I fight down another urge to hurl.

“Let me wrap it and we can get the hell to—”

He’s interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a high-energy grenade exploding to the northeast.

“Clay,” I shout into my mic, all worry about radio protocol out the window. “You all in one piece?”

“ _Not gonna be for long,_ ” Clay lobs back. “ _Cougar, get the fuck back in this bird, damnit!_ ” He pauses to let something explode too close by. “ _Eagle is taking fire._ ”

I know what has to happen. I can see in his eyes that Jensen, young and scared and green as he is, knows what has to happen. It’s just a question of whether our fearless-but-too-fucking-noble leader knows what has to happen.

“Get in the air, Eagle,” I say clearly. The kid nods his understanding. “We’ll hole up for secondary evac.”

“ _No,_ ” Clay counters, and we can clearly hear the sound of automatic weapons, now, and a second HEG. Sounds like the bad guys might not have too much ordinance to waste on our boys. But they only need one hit in the right spot. “ _We can give you ten—_ ”

“ _Colonel,_ ” Eagle’s pilot breaks in, “ _fuel tanks three and four are compromised, we are low on ordinance—”_

“We won’t get there in ten, Boss,” Jensen cuts in, surprisingly professional and matter-of-fact. “We won’t even get there in fifteen—and if you’re flames when we do, then I will have wasted a whole ton of energy I didn’t need to.”

“Get the fuck in the air before you get your ass handed to you, Clay,” I tell him seriously. “We’ll keep.”

“ _God damn it,_ ” Clay whispers. His voice is hard and bitchy as he raises it to address the Eagle crew. “ _Get the bird in the air._ ”

“ _Colonel—_ ” Cougar breaks in, the sound of his outrage causing Jensen to flinch.

“ _Get. The bird. In the air,_ ” Clay repeats ruthlessly as we hear more gunfire, but no more grenades, thank God. His voice softens and I want to smack him. Casualties of war, Frankie. We’ve been here before. “ _We will reoutfit and rendezvous at LZ 5-6-9er at 0450. Take care, stray sheep._ ”

“Roger that, Sir,” Jensen tosses back. There’s radio silence as we hear the helo’s engine pick up power, followed by a loud strafing run that hopefully takes out the majority of the guys firing on them from the ground.

“ _Eagle to stray sheep._ ” Eagle’s pilot is apologetic, but it’s the two of us or _all_ of us, and he knows it. “ _We are away. Stay safe._ ”

Neither of us bother to acknowledge, just listen to the chopper disappear into the growing dusk. It’s a few minutes of buzzing in my ears before Jensen shifts beside me. “Alone at last,” he says brightly.

Fuck. Why couldn’t I be stuck with Cougar? Least he doesn’t throw that shit in my face.

*****

Letting Jensen clean out the frags in my leg was an exercise in self control, but I’m almost glad I didn’t give in and knife him to get him to stop, as he shoulders more of my weight than I want him to while we track south toward the rendezvous.

We make good time while the light lasts, but Jensen keeps up a nonstop stream of babble.

“Man, I hate the jungle. If I end up with a leech again, I’m totally using your knife to scrape it off,” he says, a little out-of-breath, but moving us along as quick as he can. “I got one once when I was loaned out to this team in Venezuela? Gross doesn’t even begin to cover it.” I grit my teeth and remind myself that I’d be hard-pressed to crawl to the LZ in time for evac if I gut him now. “Did you know that leeches have three jaws and thirty-two brains?” I can feel the movement against my shoulder as he shakes his head. “The jaws are a lot more disturbing, in my opinion. I mean really, what does a leech think about anyway? Do you really need thirty-two brains to figure out a human leg is tasty?”

Fucking… He’s been going on like this for hours, it seems like.

“Mosquitos, though—they’re the ones you really got to watch out for. More people die from diseases gotten from mosquito bites than from any other animal-related cause. Can you believe that?”

I can’t fucking believe _this_ , that’s for damn sure.

“And the women are the killers. Male mosquitos eat flower nectar—it’s the women with a taste for human flesh.”

That’s it. The kid has no god damned filter and I’m sore and exhausted and on edge and I finally can’t stand anymore.

“I swear to God, Jensen,” I growl. “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I will slit your throat and leave you here.” I don’t… really… mean it.

He freezes up while still moving us forward, and by this time it’s too damn dark to see his face. I should probably feel guilty for opening my mouth, but Jesus Christ, he needs to learn to shut it. How his parents ever lived with that shit is beyond me. I’d’ve strangled him in his crib.

He’s smart enough to clam the hell up afterwards, though, I’ll give him that. The ringing in my ears replaces his voice—almost more annoying, but not quite—and I’m jolted out of a sort of haze by the motion of him lowering me to the ground, a grunt of effort from him saying he’s been carrying my dead weight for a while.

“Two hours out,” he says quietly, speaking for the first time in a while. “We’re a klick north of the LZ, so I figure you can take a rest here where there’s some protection.”

“Why the hell not just get there and hole up?” I ask. Not like I can get there myself. I feel like I did when I was shot and left to die in Caracas—that cotton in your head that comes from too much blood loss. And my hands are shaking.

“You’re still bleeding, Roque,” Jensen confirms. He’s being really straight-forward. Which is creepy. “It’s slowed down, but if we don’t stop, I’m afraid you’re going bleed to death before we get there.”

“Takes more than this to kill me,” I tell him bitterly, though I let him settle beside me and dig through his pack. A tiny camp light flares to life and I can see a vague ghost of him as he pulls out a space blanket and what might be a medkit. “Believe me, I’ve bled more.”

“I really didn’t want to know that,” he replies quietly. “And I still don’t want Clay killing me when I bring you back on your shield instead of with it.”

“He wouldn’t kill you, kid,” I say, hearing my words slur pathetically. “And he did the right thing, leaving us here. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I do,” he replies. I actually believe him, though I wouldn’t’ve thought he’d have it in him to be okay with that. It’s the shit of black ops—sometimes you’re just plain expendable—but he’s only a kid. He wouldn’t know that yet.

I blink and he’s closer, hands hovering over my leg like he’s not sure whether to take a look or not. “How many ops have you been on?” I ask. He’s this bizarre combination of green and seasoned and the puzzle of it pisses me off.

“Fifteen before Clay sucked me in.” He’s decided to unwrap the bandage and I hold back from screaming. At the rate we were shuffling, if we’d been followed, we’d be dead now, but that doesn’t mean I need to tell the world where we are. “God, Roque…” he breathes as he takes a good look. Almost sounds like I’m disappointing him.

Fifteen ops… “Must’ve been pretty cushy gigs, huh?” I ask, trying to take my mind off the searing pain that shoots straight to my groin and up my spine to explode against the cotton in my skull. In a normal tech, fifteen black ops would have 'em either begging to transfer to a desk or begging to get out.

He snorts and I try to focus enough to interpret the hardness in his gaze. He’s reaching for the antiseptic and Christ, I don’t want that. “Except for the eight guys who got killed on various ones, yeah,” he murmurs, tearing my pants a little more. “Pretty cushy.”

And then he’s pouring fucking blue fire into the hamburger in my leg and I’m pretty sure I do let loose a scream then.

But I’m too far gone to know.

*******

“...approaching landing zone, Eagle.”

Jensen.

“ _Acknowledged, Jackrabbit. ETA three minutes._ ”

...someone else?

“ _Should we be looking for shadows, J?_ ” Pooch’s voice comes clearer than the previous words, and I can feel my head pounding in time to my heart. Fuck, my leg hurts.

“Negative,” Jensen responds. His voice is this blank exhaustion—nothing like the crazy-ass motormouth he really is. “We’re crystal.”

I can feel myself swaying and it takes a long, long moment to figure out I’m slung over Jensen’s shoulder like a fucking lightweight after a barfight.

“ _How’s our chicken?_ ” Clay asks. The fucker.

“Drumstick’s still attached,” Jensen replies. “He’s—”

“Awake,” I finish for him, my hands twitching at his back. “Put me the fuck down.”

“He’s as cheery as ever, Colonel.” The kid slides me to the ground like I’m some china cup, and I just lie there in the pre-dawn while the blood rushes out of my skull and back into my body. What the hell happened?

“You were gonna wake me,” I remind him. “Not carry me like a bag of coffee beans.”

“Oh, God, coffee!” Jensen murmurs longingly. I might crack a smile at that. A little. He doesn’t though, just looks at me seriously. “I did _try_ to wake you, but…”

The sound of transport rotors couldn’t be more welcome, as I brush off the disturbing concern. He’s a little prick, and he’s never stop being one, but… maybe Clay didn’t totally fuck up putting him on the team.

He wipes a hand down his face and straightens up, looking out at the clearing beyond us. “The LZ is clear, Eagle,” he calls out. “We could really use a ride.”

“ _Acknowledged, Jackrabbit. On final approach._ ”

Jensen holds out a hand and I summon up the strength to grab it and let him haul me back to my feet. I _might_ be able to hobble to the damn bird.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jensen says brightly. “I fucking hate the jungle.”

And I might actually trust this guy to carry me there if I can’t.

*****  
the end


End file.
